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Unsafe at Any Speed

By | | News commentary, Transportation
21 Comments

Three months ago, Washington MetroRail’s Blue and Orange lines shut down when parts fell off the braking gear of one of the railcars, damaging another car. Hundreds of riders had to evacuate and train service was delayed for hours.

The disk brake that fell off the Metro railcar in December.

Metro initially blamed the malfunction on “premature wear,” but another railcar’s brakes fell apart in a similar manner just a month later.

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Streetcar Dreams

By | | News commentary, Urban areas
9 Comments

A few weeks ago, the Antiplanner questioned a streetcar project in Atlanta. Now comes a response from none other than Portland Mayor Sam Adams, who says Portland’s streetcar once had detractors “were afraid that it would be too expensive and people wouldn’t ride it. We don’t hear that so much these days.”

As Bojack says, “Maybe he would if he knew how to listen.” Or how to read: the big-government loving Governing magazine recently published an article detailing how Portland is running out of money to pay for its streetcar and light-rail dreams.

Meanwhile, the former city commissioner who dreamed up the Portland streetcar, then took a job for an engineering firm selling streetcars to other cities, is running for mayor of Portland. He writes an article defending the “things that are great about Portland” including “smart growth, transit, urban renewal, bicycles, [and] myself.” I guess Portlanders should vote for him if he is one of the city’s great things.
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So Much for the Koch Brothers Controlling the Antiplanner

By | | News commentary
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Toronto Transit Chief Fired

By | | News commentary, Transportation
7 Comments

In an unusual move, Toronto’s transit commission fired its chief executive, Gary Webster, because he didn’t think it was cost-effective to build an expensive subway. (Usually, transit chiefs are fired for building an expensive rail line.)

Actually, Webster thought that light rail was more cost-effective than subways. But Toronto Robert Ford wanted subways. He asked Webster for an objective evaluation of the two, and Webster presented a persuasive report favoring light rail. Apparently, Webster didn’t get the memo that he was supposed to skew the analysis in favor of the mayor’s preferences. The mayor tried to bury the report, but when the city council voted to support light rail instead of subways the mayor retaliated by convincing five members of the nine-member transit commission to fire Webster “without just cause.” That decision will cost the city $550,000, Webster’s severance pay.

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Turnabout Is Fair Play?

By | | News commentary
40 Comments

Many people are chortling that the libertarian Heartland Institute, one of the leading skeptics of anthropogenic climate change, had documents about its campaigns stolen and published. This is only fair, they say, since Heartland didn’t complain when someone stole the emails of leading government-funded climatologists that showed that the scientists were manipulating the data to make global warming appear more real.

Now global warming activist Peter Gleick has admitted that he is the one who used subterfuge to obtain the Heartland documents. Heartland had claimed that one of the documents was faked. Gleick says someone sent him this document anonymously, and to confirm it Gleick called Heartland pretending to be a board member and asked to have the institute’s board reports sent to him. He then released all the documents, including the spurious one, to the press.

As the Wall Street Journal observes, what the documents actually reveal is that Heartland operates on a relative shoestring budget funded mainly by individual donors, not corporations or government. It did receive a small grant from the infamous (and libertarian) Koch brothers, but Heartland says that grant was for a health care project, not climate change. Heartland’s total annual budget of less than $8 million is a tiny fraction of the budget of such groups as Natural Resources Defense Council ($95 million) or World Wildlife Fund ($238 million). Yes, those groups do other things with their money but so does Heartland.

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Another Light-Rail Success Failure

By | | News commentary, Transportation
18 Comments

Hampton Roads Transit is claiming success six months after opening its light-rail line in Norfolk. The line is carrying an average of 4,642 riders each weekday, which is far greater than the 2,900 that had been forecast.

“Crowds” of as many as dozens of people look bored and apathetic at the opportunity to take free rides on the opening day for Norfolk’s light-rail line, August 19, 2011. Flickr photo by D. Allen Covey, VDOT.

The only problem is that, back in 2003, Hampton Roads Transit confidently predicted the 7.4-mile-long line would carry 10,400 riders each weekday in its opening year. Deft last-minute re-predictions of much lower numbers allow the the agency to claim success when actual ridership is less than 45 percent of the original prediction.

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Crushed to Death by Red Tape

By | | Follow up, News commentary
38 Comments

The Antiplanner’s friend, Ann Brower, barely survived last February’s earthquake in Christchurch when a building fell on her bus, killing the driver and seven other passengers as well as four pedestrians. Now it turns out that the building had been known to be unsafe for nearly 30 years. The owner wanted to demolish it but couldn’t because the city considered it a “heritage building” and any work on it had to tramp through mountains of red tape.

Brower testified before a Royal Commission last week, and noted in a radio interview that numerous experts considered the building unsafe.

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One Down, 48 to Go

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
4 Comments

“Building better communities” was the slogan of the California Redevelopment Association. But the critics charged that redevelopment agencies “deprived tens of thousands of working and lower-income residents of their homes and livelihoods while granting vast subsidies to billionaires.” In the end, the social justice questions didn’t matter, but the subsidies did, so to save the state billions of dollars a year, California redevelopment agencies shut down for good last week.

The agencies had $30 billion worth of outstanding debts to private parties which will still be repaid out of tax-increment finance (TIF) revenues. But these repayments will only use about half of the $5.7 billion in TIF revenues the agencies collected each year, so now the other half will be returned to schools and other entities that rely on property taxes. Since the state has to make up the difference when schools lost money to TIF, the state ends up saving billions of dollars a year. As the debts are paid off, the state will save even more money.

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Mica Introduces Surface Transportation Bill

By | | News commentary, Transportation
33 Comments

House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee Chair John Mica introduced a proposed surface transportation bill yesterday. Titled the American Energy & Infrastructure Jobs Act, the bill contains something to make everyone happy as well as things to make everyone unhappy.

To please Senate Democrats, who want to keep spending more than the government is collecting in gasoline and other transportation taxes, the bill proposes to spend $260 billion over five years. That’s at least $10 billion a year more than revenues.

To please Tea Party Republicans, who want to reduce pork barrel spending, the bill contains no earmarks, consolidates or eliminates 70 different programs, and eliminate mandates that states spend highway money on bike paths and other non-highway programs. To please rail nuts, the bill streamlines the rail planning and approval process. To please the energy industry, the bill mandates approval for the Keystone pipeline.

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Breaking Down the Barriers

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Leave it to the New York Times to put the most negative spin on a conference about driverless cars. “Collision in the Making Between Self-Driving Cars and How the World Works,” reads the headline.

As the Antiplanner wrote three years ago, the main barriers to driverless cars are institutional and bureaucratic, not technological. So it isn’t really news when the Times reports that “an array of speakers suggested that questions of legal liability, privacy and insurance regulation might pose far more problems than the technological ones.”

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